cubs

I don't know how it started, maybe out of some kind of contrariness, like I always wanted to be left handed, but way back in Gage Park I was a Cub fan,  It made no sense.  All my friends were Sox fans, Comiskey Park was just a short bus ride away whereas to travel to Wrigley, you had to take a bus downtown and then take the exotic el train to Wrigley from there, the Cubs were always fighting the Phillies for seventh place while the Sox were behind only the hated Yankees, except for that one year.

But there it was.  When I went to college and became a hippie I lost my fandom, too square, but sometime in the fall of 1969 in Herrin Illinois I walked out of my trailer with my transistor radio and there were the Cubs.

When I came back to Champaign to tend bar I was surprised to find that most of the customers were Cub fans,  It was like when I was a kid and we got off the el at Addison, where did all these Cub fans come from?

And I have stuck with them ever since, loveable losers, blah, blah, blah, and I guess I acquired some of that bitterness.  Victory could never be ours, in fact the beloved Cubs became tormentors, it seemed like, like they were almost conspiring to lose, to add to the pain of their fans, to punish them for being so stupid.

And then the current team, everyone picked us to take it all, and the first half of the season we ran away with it, and then in the middle of the season, that awful slump, the bitterness came back, those bastards, they were toying with us again.  But after a couple weeks it faded and we were back to being supermen again.

We won the NL east with the best record in all of baseball, we were teens ahead of those hateful Cardinals, we polished off the Giants like crud from our cleats, and expected to do the same with the Dodgers, but suddenly we were behind (behind???) in the series 1 to 2, our bats cold and lifeless, but then our bats came alive in the next two games and Saturday night I was in the downstairs bar when our double play gave us the series and there was all this screaming.  Where was it coming from?  Oh, it was coming from me.

Where does it come from?  Was I any richer, smarter, younger?  No, no, no.  Are the Cubs, like the democrats, after their upcoming victory, going to usher in a new era of peace and prosperity?  No.  They are all millionaires, you know they are all Republicans.

So I don't  know, it's a peculiar thing.  I hate the current owners of the Cubs. I love the players of course, but if the Cubs traded them all away and got new ones I would love the new ones,  If they left Wrigley, as they sometimes hinted in the bad old days, for a spanking new up to date ballpark in distant suburbia in a sea of parking lots, would I stop loving them?  Maybe.